Mesolimbic Vignettes
by Rynnah K
Summary: Watson has had enough of Holmes' behavior. However, when he barges into his old flat in the middle of the night to confront him, Holmes appears to have a confrontation of his own to make. Oneshot, slash, basically PWP.


**A/N**: **Heya kids. This is my first fic for Holmes and Watson, I appeared here as an Avengers kid. And we are going to pretend like I shouldn't have finished chapter nine for In the Night before finishing this. Anywho. There are probably inconsistencies with Mary, but she isn't that important so yah haha. Hopefully it isn't too OOC. Also, let's not even go into how long it took me to finish this. It would just embarrass everyone haha. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

**Warnings: Drugs, some language, verbosity, anachronistic metaphors, science, typos and run on sentences (most likely), and m/m slash. If you do not like any of these things, do not continue reading, because it will not make you happy.**

* * *

"Watson." The form of Watson's name over his teeth is wrong, flat and overripe, something slick like decay hiding in the catch of 's' on Holmes' morphia-slow tongue.

His eyes pool like pitch, the embers of madness slumbering within but alive. He wears a waistcoat that looks suspiciously like one of Watson's except it looks as though it has been doused in ink, the entire form of it steeped two whole octaves lower than it should have been. There is a slight tear in a knee of his trousers and the sleeves of his shirt are loose. He smells of fire and insomnia where both Mary and Mary's family smell of honey and real pearls, saltwater.

The smile disappears from Watson's face, shunted from his features like air from a vacuum. He replies, "Holmes, well met old boy," with a smile made entirely of aspartame. Neither moves to embrace the other and Watson dutifully supplies introductions, a slug of mercury taking up residence in his lower intestine.

Watson knows this is a bad idea—knows there is no world in which Sherlock does not hate him his marriage. Watson knows there is no world in which Sherlock does not sublimate to self-destructiveness bordering on suicide as soon as the door closes separating him from Watson.

There is no world in which a civil dinner between his wife, in-laws and…his Sherlock Holmes exists. Watson knows this is a bad idea.

* * *

Holmes' meaning is off limit to him in the way the secrets hiding in the slender stranglehold of his throat-meets-clavicle are off limit. So when Holmes ends the dinner prematurely through his gauche interactions, grating and harsh like the flare of sulfur lighting a match, Watson has no reason to present to Mary. He offers no explanation to his in-laws, and finds a heatless white fury blotting out his vision. Fury toward them for their pretentiousness. Fury toward himself for living in a giant dollhouse, playing make-believe at a pretend life he is too gnarled for. But mostly John Watson is furious with Sherlock Holmes.

Watson goes home with Mary on his arm, her aubergine crepe dress crinkling softly, jet buttons lining the tremulous line of her spine, the frailty of her wrists. She supposes, too milky, "Have you a clue what got into Holmes this evening?" Her teeth hide her real question of 'what happened between you two and why, after 4 months, was your reunion more of that between two ex-lovers than two ex-partners?' There is vitriolic glee in the supposition.

"No, I haven't," he supposes back, no inflection in the pronoun, the vowels unsubstantial and corrugated with acid. John Watson can be vitriolic too, as it turns out.

* * *

When Mary is dressed only in cream silk, body curving toward him, eyes the green of hemlock, Watson can think only of needles and vials of cocaine tinged pink with venous backwash. The desire for her is the desire for a different life, for a world where her pliancy does not turn into the harsh thrust of blunted nails against his iliac crests and teeth tearing at his carotid. And still, somehow, against Watson's will, he ends up lost in a different bed, biting at needle-holes in someone else's arm. The force of his orgasm collapses him over her, though not on her or in her, and he finds that once again he has left bite marks and bruises on her, despite strict promises to not. Her hemlock eyes turn dark with threat, pitching close to betrayal, and Watson cannot decide whom he hates the most in that moment.

* * *

Holmes has no such qualms, floating in a great sea of chloroform fumes, cirrus smoke puncturing holes in his reality. He does not remember taking the needle from his arm, decides an air embolus would be just fate, and drowns in the murky tide of Watson's mouth, grim, set against him.

When he wakes up too soon Sherlock dismisses Miss Hudson and empties a full round into the wall before he slides his tongue against the heated barrel experimentally. He bites his lip at the bitters of gunpowder, sets the gun down, and opens a new vial.

* * *

It is the grimy hours of the morning, foggy and ghost lit yellow from the lamps, when Watson's rage boils over. He cannot sleep for it, restlessness and fury pinching thousands of small holes into his skin. He leaves bed, dresses quickly and in too few layers against the damp, the hush of cloth conspiratorial against his bare hips. His exit does not so much as disturb Mary, asleep as far from Watson as she can get while remaining in the same bed with him.

The cold makes Watson's leg ache and water droplets from the heavy fog and pollution condense in his clothes, on his skin, bead in his eyelashes. By the time he actually arrives at Baker Street he is soaked through but his system is warm with the entirety of his hip flask's whiskey. It is not strong enough to validate his being there though, not nearly enough to excuse his barging in to the residence without so much as knocking. He knows from experience Miss Hudson is not there, can taste the knife's edge of Sherlock's latest binge in the air from the street.

Watson expects what he finds when he uses the butt end of his cane to force open the door to Sherlock's room. Watson expects it and yet the sight of Holmes sitting stock-still, demon light pulsing out of his eyes, piercing him, still sends a thrill through him. Sherlock smiles from one side of his mouth, feline and feral, consumed with cocaine and it is not really a smile at all.

"Watson. How nice of you to join me this fine morning." His voice is all barbed hooks and crackling electricity, latent lightning just waiting to find a conduit in the ground before it strikes.

He is shirtless, hair in disarray, trousers precariously low on the v of his hips. There are new holes in his arm that he rubs at subconsciously and Watson, though he knows they do not, somehow still sees them leaking a trickle of base over the tan skin. He leaves reality briefly as he sees himself lapping up their trail, suckling the pinpricks, memorizing the exact taste of giving in to one's darkling instincts.

"Do you understand the concept of marriage?" It is the first thing Watson's throat works out, not the first thing he actually means to say.

Holmes stands and makes his way across the room, his movements rigid and stark compared to the twin abysses of his eyes, spilling tendrils of lazy gravity toward Watson, ensnaring him. Holmes comes to stand in front of Watson, who realizes he is coated in condensation, pearled like a newborn from the heart of an oyster.

"To what do you refer?" Holmes' voice is hushed like downed wire. He circles closer to Watson, incrementally backing him to the wall.

"Your obvious attempt at damaging my reputation with Mary's parents. A successful attempt, might I add." Watson is stilted, formal, as he angrily blinks at the water clinging to his eyelashes. Droplets fall and splash a rime of rainbow across Watson's vision, throwing Holmes into glittering relief, diamonds catching in the hair dark on his chest, leading lower. Watson's face lights and he balls his fists against the atomic-white flash of need.

"I attempted nothing of the sort, old boy. Besides, I hardly think you've stuck around all these years, broken into my house in the middle of the night to watch me _behave_." The last word he whispers flush against Watson's neck, who realizes belatedly he's been trapped as he feels the bullet-hole ridden door against his back.

Watson manages to get his cane solidly in the aperture between himself and Holmes, presses it flat against the dogged insistence of Holmes' form, lays it out as an unyielding line in the sand between what John Watson will put up with what he will not. He would like to say he has had enough in that moment, but he knows there is no enough.

Not for him and Holmes. There can be no away with the petri dish of emotions Watson cultivates on the tops of his pulmonary semi-lunar valves, threatening to spill over and entirely overrun his heart. And yet, worse still than the never-full drain is not trying to fill it at all. Something must be the sacrifice to the hungry nothingness. Penance must be paid.

"The concept of marriage," Watson begins, eyes unfocussed, scrabbling for a different dimension to grab onto for stability, "is that two become one. Two halves of a whole are finally joined in a union that renders completeness to both parties. This concept encompasses with it the inheritance of a new family unit that ideally should increased the newly married couples' happiness." Watson breathes out, throaty and choked with what seems to be dress pins lodged in his esophagus.

Holmes decouples from Watson against the wall and resumes pacing, staring at or through him. "Do you quote from one particular source? Perhaps from personal experience, doctor?" Holmes needs to hear Watson say it.

_I've moved on and left you and did not think of you once in four months, not during the wedding when I managed to exchange my vows without event, not on the wedding night, as I tangled softly in dappled doe hide, not when chestnut curls tumbled over my shoulder, softer than the sighs of my other half as I did my duty as a husband. I thought of you not once during four months, in bed or otherwise. The gravity of my molten core is the exact same without you, even though the disappearance of myself from your core is an entirely different matter. _

Without John's half of him or his gravity to anchor him, Sherlock's whole orbit is falling apart, the physics of it unsustainable. Holmes can feel positrons accumulating in the corners of his eyes, clotting in his temporal lobe, just hours, maybe less, from thrusting him entirely apart into lone atoms.

"Yes, I do," Watson's voice tremolos with indignation. _Yes, you do. You _do. Holmes can hear how fiercely Watson wants to believe it, the culling tide of anger he fights to chain. Holmes feels the echo of it vaguely try to pierce through him, radioactive and destructive, but the desperation of Watson does not manage to pierce the cage of tungsten Holmes has built around his heart, fortified with opiods. Not entirely at least. He is suddenly against Watson again, who does not manage to lift his cane a second time.

"Say it again. Lie to me again, Watson." Ethylene glycol licking at his vision, poisonous but sweet, whispering to him _sip me_, _sip._

"I'm not _lying _you, you," and Watson cannot finish, has no words. He is breathless with rage he never vents, glass shards of it exploding through his control like the shattering of a halogen light bulb.

"Aren't you?" Holmes whispers, dosed on cocaine, and he presses his lips to the angry limit of Watson's neck, crashes through the asymptote, the line he should not be able to cross. And yet crossing is easy, he can taste the origin in the thunder of Watson's carotid, heady under his mouth as he opens against him. He bites, rasp of canine and tongue against fog-steeped skin.

Watson throws the first punch and Holmes lets him, lets it catch him right at the temporal mandibular joint, lets himself really feel it, really feel just how much Watson wants to not stand him. And then, because he can't not, Holmes hits back in the exact same spot on Watson, where a bruise blooms to mirror his own. They are enantiomers of each other, chiral and nonsuperimposable, but irreparably marked as part of the same compound. It is easy to believe that they are racemic—under certain conditions they decompose into the other. Like now, Watson's eyes molten with the need to hurt Holmes like he hurts, dark mirrors of each other.

They tear at each other until Watson finally throws himself at Holmes and the two crash to the ground, buttons torn off and legs tangled. Watson cannot see past the terrible chokecherry of emotion, a bitter well spraying ink against the judgment centers in his brain, blotting them out. Chest heaving, he fits his hands around Holmes' throat, who lets him, eyes huge but void of fear. Watson tightens his hold experimentally, thumbs the rings of cartilage beneath his fingers. Holmes' eyes flutter, lashes long and dark and wet, and he arches against the stranglehold, presses his hips against Watson's thighs.

Watson lets go at that, tries to disengage but doesn't get the chance. Holmes turns them over in one sinuous movement, lays Watson out. Holmes tears at his shirt and Watson struggles against his flexible hands, though he is fully hard, his pupils gaping and torn, open like an abandoned uranium mine.

"Get off of me." His voice shakes with rage.

"No." Holmes ignores him, grabs Watson's wrists and forces them over his head. Watson thrashes in frustration but the rejection has no true fight in it, the teeth ground down to bloody nubs under Sherlock's hands. Holmes folds himself against Watson's bare chest, feels the simmering skin against his own too-heated heart and covers Watson's mouth with his own, swallows the denial there.

It is like trying to inhale a fire, as Watson suffocates in the gunpowder of Holmes' mouth. He opens his mouth willingly, though that is not what he means to do and feels himself slowly turning to ash as Sherlock's tongue runs against the ridges of the roof of his mouth. He tears at Sherlock's lip savagely, and tastes the spill of hemoglobin into his mouth.

"Let me." Sherlock's voice shakes, but he continues. "John._" _And Sherlock's plea, he who pleads, who asks for nothing, is sodden with a need that is incumbent.

"Damnit John, _let me_." Watson groans low in his throat at that, eyes closed and then he goes slack, heat lancing through him at Sherlock's voice scraped thin, pleading with him. He frees his wrists and grabs the back of Holmes' hips with crushing force, pulling him down. As Holmes flattens against the body beneath him, one of Watson's arms snake around the back of Holmes' hips and the good doctor arches into him, shudders against him, mouth open, air rasping out like his lungs have ruptured.

And yet, John Watson, the doctor, the proprietary charmer of London society, noble husband, does not exist in that moment. In the moment when arms force his body against that of Sherlock Holmes, degenerate detective, in the moment when John Watson's hand runs crushing up the other man's spine, tugs hard at unkempt hair, he is John Watson, degenerate gambler, incorrigible failure in the pursuit of happiness. He is a half of a whole, drowning in loneliness and despair over green eyes and feminine curves, tormented by pits of blackness and the heady need for someone unyielding, flesh shackles to break him instead.

There is no good doctor who tears at Holmes' pants with all restraint unshackled from its tidy cupboard in Watson's mind, who rips the improperly utilized belt from its loops and snaps it hard against Sherlock Holmes' chest.

Sherlock feels the lick of the belt like a tumbler of vodka in the desert, catalysis to reach the end. It is easy to see Watson has gone feral from isolation of the worst possible variety—the isolation from the object of one's desire. He bleeds icy cruelty all over the floor—Holmes can see the form of Watson melting from it, splashing glaciermelt onto his bare chest where he sprawls between Watson's legs.

Holmes shudders with narcotic euphoria as Watson's teeth knead into his neck, hands bruising against Holmes' biceps, holding him in place. He moans, his whole form shuddering, and feels an answering whimper leak out of Watson.

"I _can't_" Watson rasps out, voice failing even as he claws at the inside of Holmes' arms, even as he bites at the needle marks there, veins of darkness, like he has in his dreams for months now. Holmes goes pliant as he watches John lick at the ruins he has made of his body, visible marks of the madness within him. His voice is soft when he replies, "And yet, you seem to be."

Watson growls and bites him hard enough that his canines sink into his skin. He laps at the blood that wells there like he cannot stop himself, shaking, and then pushes himself away from Holmes like he is awakening from a nightmare.

Holmes sits stock still in pants shredded to the knees, choke marks light around his throat, claw marks on his chest, arm spotted with blood, eyes so black they seem to have no whites at all, sweaty and hard and somehow entirely not of this world. He watches John scramble from him, eyes open and fluid with shock, matching bruises all over him.

"Are you going to leave me now John?" Holmes' voice slithers and hypnotizes as he glides toward Watson, who is immobile and panting.

"Go ahead," he hisses into Watson's ear as he forces him down, nails harsh against his scalp, elbows against his throat. Watson makes some unintelligible noise, spits out, "Go to hell Sherlock," but it is interrupted as Holmes' other hand rips him free of his smalls—neither remembers when his pants exited the equation—and is suddenly stroking him roughly. Watson doesn't moan so much as rumble, vibrations dark in his throat, as Holmes lubes him up with his precome, jerks him rough and slow.

"I thought you were leaving _Doctor_." Sherlock's voice is lambent with something dangerous as he works Watson over. He can feel something like cocaine trickling out of his eyes as he watches the doctor writhe on the floor under his unyielding grip, a high like nothing the drugs can bring him flaring in his dopamine pathways. Holmes makes sure to grip Watson heard enough to leave bruises on his hip he can't explain to Mary.

_Mine_.

Holmes never would have guessed that the doctor would be silent in the throes of passion, communicating pleasure only by the spasming of muscles. He does not believe this to be the case, not for one moment, and seeks to draw what he wants from the other.

When Holmes' hand disappears from Watson's hip and reappears sliding between his ass, something seems to shatter in Watson, who bites his lip to hold in his moan, tries to wire his jaw shut and shudders when a saliva slick finger circles him, teasing. His eyes pop open, oceanic and passion dark and _needy _and Sherlock flips Watson onto his stomach, suppresses a tremor threatening to take over his hands at the sight of his compatriot bared for him. He quickly divests himself of his—mostly torn, at this point—undergarments and then slashes Watson's shirt off of his back, turning the white linen to ribbons with careless flicks of his wrist, a needle-thin dagger with a jade hilt from who knows where in his palms. He flings it away from him when he is satisfied with the view, a view quickly disrupted as Watson attempts to turn over.

"Can you leave nothing in tact? What am I to wear back to my house?" Watson's voice sounds, angry, currents of electricity making his voice spark. As he attempts to turn over, to glare at the detective, Sherlock presses him back to the carpet, a hand heavy against the sinew of his lower back.

"You know I cannot. Compulsion leads me elsewhere," Holmes whispers. He spreads Watson then and licks at him. Watson jerks against him and the motion makes Holmes' tongue breach him. Holmes slides his tongue in deeper, wondering how far he can go, and then, when Watson hoarsely grinds out, "You are truly depraved," voice utterly fucked out, he pulls out.

"You the more so, my dear boy, for _enjoying _it," Holmes hisses back as he replaces his tongue with an ointment-coated finger and reaches to Watson's front, grabs his weeping dick. Watson thrusts back into Holmes' hands, a stifled moan working its way out of his throat, utterly proving Holmes' point.

Holmes slides another finger into Watson, opens him roughly, unable to look too hard at the sight of John on his stomach, breathing harshly, shoving his ass onto his fingers, the doctor pretending to be dignified even in this, a position nobody else could endeavor to get him in. He groans lowly into the carpet as Holmes relentlessly works him over until he brushes against the bundle of nerves inside of Watson. At that he finally breaks, starts babbling low under his breath, undistinguishable.

"What was that?" Holmes breathes, breathing deeply, trying not to come just from the sight of him.

"_Sherlock, _I, I" he groans and then, at the sound of his name said shot through with want, at the sound of what he's been waiting for, Holmes cannot stop himself and slams into Watson, the rings of muscle in the other man flaring open at the intrusion.

After that they are flashes of lightning, searing and hot, both of them lost in needing each other, sensation reduced to a series of mesolimbic vignettes: The visceral _grip _of Watson's muscles on him, Sherlock scratching against Watson's back, sweating like he is trying to break a fever, John's death grip on Sherlock's wrist closest to him, anchoring him as he is pounded into the floor. Both of them pretend they are not sentimental people, not even with each other, and they meet like dry ice subliming.

John can do nothing but melt into the floor as Sherlock, who is ever rough with what is his, endeavors to break him. The detective thrusts mercilessly against his prostate, his thigh muscles flexing around the doctor's hips until Watson is seeing in streaks of static behind his eyes and when his hearing comes back to him long enough to hear Sherlock grunt, "_Mine_" against him, a statement accompanied by a savage bite on his shoulder, he comes explosively. Watson feels Sherlock lose himself inside him distantly as some netherworld of narcotic anesthesia pulls him down into its spiraling, cosmic center.

Watson comes to on his stomach, sweaty and damp and smelling of pollution, sex, and _Holmes, _pain licking through him. He opens his eyes and shifts onto his side, heart rate picking up slightly when he finds Holmes not six inches from him, staring at him unblinking, eyes liquid, sated. He brushes against Watson's shoulder gently, tracing the purpling bite mark there, sighs through his nose and Watson can see the statement there on him, written in the bunch of his shoulders, the purpling bruise ringing his wrist, something Holmes will never say.

_Don't go_.

It is clear how much he has cost both of them in his denial of this, the two of them, and Watson offers the only amelioration he can. "I thought of you every day for those four months," his voice breaks an octave lower, but he forces himself to continue, "Every fucking day Sherlock."

Holmes' eyes flicker at that, disbelieving, his mouth curling into a self-hating smirk and Watson can think of only one way to convince him. He grabs the detective and forces him onto his back, climbs on top of him and molds to the other man's form. He winds his hands into his molasses dark hair, tugs on Holmes, grips him fiercely, all he can do.

"And the nights?" Holmes whispers, almost too quietly for Watson to hear.

"You are my nights," Watson pretends like his voice isn't too rough with emotion and Holmes pretends like he doesn't wrap his arms around the other man and hold him too tightly in response.

"And you mine."

* * *

**So yah. Hopefully it wasn't too cliché. I seem to have a fondness for cliché endings. Idk, I'm super insecure about this in general I guess, so I would love to hear what y'all thought. Lots of love kids. **


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